Timmy was sixteen when he saw Dorothy in the mountains of North Carolina. She was not skipping down the yellow brick road, as she had when he was a little kid. Instead, she was stumbling across the 17^th green at Chalmer's Ridge Resort.

"Hi," she said, all pigtails and blue-checked dress, gingham modernized to mini-skirt, frilly and poofed out at the shoulders and hem. Her eyes were glassy. This was the Dorothy of the 1970s, the post-flower child Dorothy. He stood by the green with his father's pitching wedge in his hand, a couple of old range balls at his feet. While her head was turned toward him, she stumbled and kicked up a divot from the crew cut grass.

"Oops!" She giggled in his direction, and then she staggered on down the fairway toward the growl of the Oz party.

He was drawn, trancelike, and he followed her at a distance. She exited his vision through the gate of the pool that went with the condos. He'd heard that the Ozzies inhabited the condos.

He darted toward the gate, his feet couldn't move fast enough, and he peered through a space between the redwood boards of the tall fence. He was unprepared for what he saw. Dorothy was standing on the diving board performing a strip show to the song "Jackie Blue" by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. She'd already removed the dress and it was sinking in the pool. He watched her remove her bra and panties. She took a moment to twirl them on her finger before flinging them into the water. He barely glimpsed her breasts before his eyes were sucked down to the patch of mysterious and inviting hair below her navel. Before he could fully process the magic of the sight, she turned to some characters hollering from the other side of the pool -- tin men and scarecrows, lions and munchkins. She turned to them and danced. He watched about ten seconds of her butt bouncing until the Great and Powerful Oz came toward the fence where he stood. He was frozen for a few seconds and then he realized Oz hadn't seen him, but was simply retrieving a Schlitz can from the deck beside a lounge chair. Still, he was scared of being seen, so he took off running back down the 17th fairway toward the house his family had rented.

 

The next day he visited the amusement park for the first time. It was only two miles from the resort. At sixteen he didn't want to be seen with his mom and his little sister, so he quickly separated himself from them just inside the gate, and rushed to the chairlift that carried them up the mountain to the main part of the park. Dorothy had a microphone inside the wooden shed where he got in line to ride the chairlift. She gave her welcome spiel. The smell of the wood in the queue building would stick with him in the years to come, so that any time he encountered that type of wood, whatever it was, the smell would instantly bring back not only the memory of that day, but the visceral ache of the entire summer.

Dorothy's eyes were a little bloodshot as she spoke, but she was chipper and really into her role. And damn, she was pretty.

"I'm the only Dorothy here," she told some small kids. "You'll see me all over the park, and you'll wonder how I can get from one place to another so quickly. It's because I have magic from the Land of Oz, with Glenda the Good Witch and the Great and Powerful Wizard himself on my side."

He watched her speak, her lips moving so gracefully, and he recalled her bouncing naked on the diving board. Here was a woman and a girl, he thought, capable of being sexy by night and wholesome by day. Though he'd lusted before, had juvenile crushes, even gotten his finger wet once behind the bathhouse at a country club swimming pool, this was his first encounter with hardcore infatuation.

He want her to remember seeing him on the golf course, not to come right out and mention it in front of everybody, but to give him a wink or at least a knowing glance. As he wound around the metal railing that formed the queue, he relentlessly tried to position himself in her line of sight. But she kept looking away, either not noticing him or trying to ignore him. He ached in a way he'd never known a person could ache.

So as the chairlift climbed he was still thinking about her, barely aware of the ground passing beneath him as he careered through the clearing that had been cut in the woods. It would not be until subsequent trips that he would notice the sad beauty of the lush landscape beginning to be mottled with manmade blemishes.

But he certainly felt he was on a journey that first time in the chairlift, as if he'd been in the tornado with Dorothy. His world was twisted and shaken, sent reeling by the mini-skirted farm girl to some dimension not yet pinpointed by any frame of reference he'd known.

When the chairlift landed, there she was again, only she wasn't. There was Dorothy, but of course, it was a different employee dressed the same way. The hair color and pigtails were the same, and she was approximately the same size, but her legs were not as tan. She greeted him as he stepped out of the chairlift, and he saw that she bore painful-looking acne, big red splotches across her cheeks and chin, dabbed with makeup in a futile attempt to hide them.

"You're not the same one!" a kid from a chairlift behind yours yelled as he got out of the lift. "She said she was the only one. She was telling a story."

"Why sure I'm the same one," Dorothy replied. "There's only one Dorothy here in the Land of Oz. Everybody knows that."

"Unt uh." The kid shook his head. "The other one didn't have those mosquito bites on her face."

She blushed and her pimples inflamed. Her eyes watered a little. Timmy felt sorry for her, but at the same time, he felt an odd attraction. It was not quite the same attraction he felt for the other Dorothy, but the two merged in his mind and he felt he could love his Dorothy even if she were a full-blown leper. It was the real thing, he believed. True love. It was Dorothy who stimulated both the best and worst instincts in him, took him down two roads, which seemed like one.

The first stop was Dorothy's Kansas home. A Dorothy directed him through a door and into a hallway of sorts, where a cheap film of a tornado was broadcast as he walked through, air blowing on him from somewhere. On the other side, he entered a room where furniture was turned upside-down and pictures hung askew. This was Dorothy's house after the tornado. Outside he stepped onto the beginning of the yellow brick road, which led him to the rest of the park's sites.

He whisked by a couple of munchkins selling lollipops, and came to a fork in the yellow road where a scarecrow did his little "some folks do go both ways" bit. Now he imagined alternate Dorothys down each road: the pimpled, sad farm girl down one, the bad, sexy woman down the other. He took the road leading to a stage show, where singers and dancers performed Wizard of Oz songs and contemporary pop songs until the show's culmination -- Dorothy rising up in a hot air balloon, sailing over the crowd and waving. It seemed she was looking right at him as she waved, beckoning him to follow, follow.

 

Going to the park got to be a habit for him that summer. Even though it was the same old stuff over and over, he never tired of it.

Spying on the Ozzies' evening pool parties through the redwood-slatted fence got to be a habit for him, too. Sometimes they were naked, sometimes not. Always they were drinking, and sometimes he caught the smell that reminded him of when he and his buddy had set fire to dry pecan tree leaves with a magnifying glass. It seemed that only young people, mostly the Land of Oz employees, lived in the small condo building.

The Dorothy with the acne – Shelby, her name would turn out to be –– was usually not at the pool parties. The few times he saw her there, she was fully clothed in shorts and a T-shirt, and she was never drinking.

So the late afternoon he found the courage to make his way into one of the parties, it surprised him that Shelby was the one who lured him there. She was standing with some guys near the part of the fence where he usually spied through the slats. To his dismay she was chugging a beer and talking more than he'd ever seen her talk. Dancing a little to the music while the guys talked. She was a different person, it seemed, and he'd seen alcohol have this effect on his parents and their friends, so he figured she was under the influence. In a way, he was disappointed. In another way, he was excited.

He stood up and peered over the fence instead of through it. He stood there a few minutes before anyone paid him any attention. Finally, Shelby saw him and said, "Hey, honey. Why don't you come in here and join us?"

This seemed really out of character from what he'd seen of her, but again, he thought of the alcohol. The guys around her looked at him and one of them shrugged. Timmy tried his best to look casual and cool, shoving his hands in the pockets of his cutoff Levis as he entered the gate and made his way to their circle, but he felt their eyes on him. There he stood saying nothing and feeling really uncomfortable for a minute until the other Dorothy, the one he'd seen dancing naked that first evening, came over and grabbed his hand.

"Hey, what's your name?"

"Timmy." His voice shook and he felt as if he were outside himself and hearing himself as a stranger would. He sounded pathetically nervous, he thought.

"I'm Janet," she said. Somehow this disappointed him; he wanted to know her only as Dorothy, didn't want to see any other identity for her. She smiled and then put her mouth to his ear.

"Wanna get high?" she said.

She led him to a couple of lounge chairs on the other side of the pool, where he gulped the first three beers and smoked the first joint of his life. He grew optimistic, senses dulled and his inhibitions drifting away with the smoke from the joint, that it would be a night of firsts. Added to his quick intoxication was the sight of her brown thigh poking out from her gingham as she propped her ankle up on his knee. A smattering of blonde stubble shimmered in the late day sun and he followed its line with his eyes up to the blue and white checked hem.

Some of the guys coaxed Shelby into taking off all her clothes, while dancing to Alice Cooper's "Be My Lover." She couldn't dance at all, and when her shirt came off Timmy could see that she had big red bumps all over her chest and back, not just on her face. He wanted to feel sorry for her, but the truth was she had decent tits and any sympathy he might have felt tiptoe inside him was easily squelched by the hulking mass of lust. It wasn't until she jumped in the pool that he returned his attention to Janet.

 

Later he was in Janet's room, an efficiency apartment with two single beds, a couch, a stereo, and off-white shag carpet, stained in many spots. Three Dog Night was on the stereo. Some purple beads hanging from the ceiling sectioned off a tiny kitchen. The walls were spotted with posters of rock stars ranging from Janis Joplin to Isaac Hayes. Janet and Timmy drank wine and smoked dope to "The Road to Shambala." This made him feel a little more comfortable, as did the fact that Janet seemed to think he was older than he really was.

When she kissed him he closed his eyes. Dorothy merged with the pot and the music: "I can tell my sister, by the flowers in her eyes, out on the road to Shambala." The Yellow Brick Road to Shambala. Everything seemed magically connected, and before he knew it, her shirt was off and she was loosening his cutoffs.

When they were both naked she took the joint, then moved her face close to his. When she blew him a shotgun, it was like a plumber blowing out a clogged line; he felt all the childhood left in his brain flush out like so much drain gunk.

He heard a key in the door, and though he felt a vague notion that he should be alarmed, he giggled as the knob turned and the door opened.

In walked the other Dorothy. The pimples on her face seemed angrier than ever and in his marijuana haze they seemed to take on the significance of facial features, like extra noses or dimples or something. He barely had enough wit about him to work at suppressing a laugh, but a stifled giggle burped out anyway.

"Hi," he said, feeling like it was the dumbest thing he'd ever said, but it also sounded funny to his ears, as if some other dumbass had said it, and when Janet broke out in a hard laugh he couldn't help but join her.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Shelby said from the door. "I'll come back later." From the way she said it he surmised that they were roommates and he got a feeling that Shelby had grown accustomed to giving up her rights to the room.

Janet rolled her eyes as Shelby quietly closed the door. Then she started kissing him some more, but he realize he'd lost the hard-on that he hadn't realized he'd had. He felt pressure to make it come back, and so he couldn't.

He opened his eyes and spied a pink jewelry box on the other bed.

Janet must have sensed his anxiety, he thought, because she stopped kissing him. The two of them sat silently for a moment.

"Is that your jewelry box, or your roommate's?" he asked.

"It's Shelby's, a.k.a. Weird Bitch of the East."

"You don't like her?" he said.

"No."

"Why not?"

Janet shrugged. "Well, it's kind of hard to explain, but you see, most of us found out about this job from bulletin boards at our colleges. But she found out about it from her uncle, who works in the factory that made the goddamn bricks for the yellow brick road." She burst out laughing. "Can you fucking believe that?"

He got up and walked over to the other bed, inspected the outside of the jewelry box, the size of a child's lunch box, pink with some worn, golden glitter designs. He opened it and a little ballerina popped up and twirled to some sad tune he remembered from somewhere, the music and the twirling slow from lack of winding. In the box below the dancer he saw some hippie beads, a cross, a Saint Christopher medal, an envelope with "Mother and Daddy" for a return address.

He looked at Janet on the bed. She was sitting cross-legged and re-lighting the joint, taking a deep, long draw as he slipped his clothes back on. He smiled at her as he started to leave. He saw her take the joint out of her mouth as he closed the door behind him and from the hallway he heard her shout at him, "What the fuck?"

But she didn't follow him as he rode the elevator down to the ground floor and walked out beside the pool. He heard soft voices coming from the room where the pool plumbing was housed and he walked over and looked in. He saw two witches, still in costumes from their shifts, sitting close together behind the pump system. Their backs were to him. One witch reached her hand up and ran it through the other's hair. He heard the gate to the pool open behind him and he turn to see Shelby heading toward the golf course.

He ran to the gate and opened it, watched her walking down the 17th fairway. At a careful distance he walked behind her. She started skipping, and though he sped up a little, she got farther and farther away, until he was almost to the green of the 17^th hole, near his vacation home.

He didn't notice the men tee off behind him, though he might have vaguely registered the sound of their cart sputtering down the fairway for their second shots. As he stood in front of the green and watched Dorothy fade, skipping down another fairway, he heard a man yell, "Fore!" A violent little ball smacked the green in front of him, not ten yards away. He suddenly noticed that it was almost too dark to be playing golf, and it occurred to him that his family might be worried about him.

"I liked to hit you, son," the golfer yelled behind him. "You best keep your head up out here."

More Fiction